The feeding of pathological or highly infectuous wastes into an incinerator has long been a problem due to the nature of these pathological or highly infectuous waste materials with respect to leakage or spillage of pathological fluids and the handling of these types of waste materials for inserting them into the incinerator.
Although mechanical feeding systems have been previously proposed for incinerators, these present problems in that all surfaces must be kept clean and the interface between the mechanical feeder and the incinerator charging door must have zero leakage to the working environment. It is not desirable to have the escape of fumes, smoke or particulate matter from the incinerator when incinerating these types of highly infectuous or pathological materials. Mechanical ram type waste feeding systems for incinerators, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,708,087, issued Jan. 2, 1973, and assigned to the assignee of the present invention, would not be appropriate for the feeding of these types of high infectuous or pathological waste materials due to resulting leakage and spillage of the pathological fluids on the moving surfaces and the housekeeping problems with such a mechanical feeding system would become a major nuisance.